This morning I lined up to get a couple of tickets to the Australian Chamber Orchestra’s upcoming performance of Vivalidi’s Four Seasons.  What I didn’t know was that this morning tickets went on sale for the rugby league grand final.  You could image the dirty looks I got from the people in the line when I got to the front of the line and asked for classical concert tickets instead of the highly prized limited tickets!

I’m sure I’ll get just as much enjoyment out of my once in a lifetime concert as they will out of their once in a lifetime football game. 

Have I turned into Frasier Crane?

The Australian Council for the Arts have just released their annual Books Alive list of 50 books you can’t put down. Books Alive is an initiative to encourage people to read. On their website they have a list of where you can purchase the books, but they haven’t included a list of which libraries stock the books. If you are trying to encourage people to read then there should be no barriers for anyone - especially financial barriers. So for all of those that wish to read, but don’t want to pay for the privilege, here is a list of all the libraries in Australia that have the 50 books you can’t put down.

• The Household Guide to Dying by Debra Adelaide
• Breath by Tim Winton
• People of the book by Geraldine Brooks
• The Spare Room by Helen Garner
• Scar Tissue by Anthony Kiedis
• The Six Sacred Stones by Matthew Reilly
• Exit Music by Ian Rankin
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
• Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali
• A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
• God’s Callgirl by Carla van Raay
• Change of Heart by Jodi Picoult
• Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
• Those Faraday Girls by Monica McInerney
• Skin and Bone by Kathryn Fox
• 7th Heaven by James Patterson with Maxine Paetro
• Secrets of the Red Lantern by Pauline Nguyen with Luke Nguyen and Mark Jensen
• The Forgotten Garden by Kate Morton
• Somme Mud by E.P.F. Lynch
• Vietnam: The Australian War by Paul Ham
• Les Norton and the Case of the Talking Pie Crust by Robert G. Barrett
• Turn Turn Turn . . . Please by Kerry O’Keeffe
• Over the Top with Jim by Hugh Lunn
• That’d Be Right by William McInnes
• The Day After Tomorrow by Allan Folsom
• Nothing to Lose by Lee Child
• The Memory Room by Christopher Koch
• Addition by Toni Jordan
• Voodoo Doll by Leah Giarratano
• The Rouseabout by Rachael Treasure
• Avoiding Mr Right by Anita Heiss
• This Charming Man by Marian Keyes
• Back from the Brink by Peter Andrews
• True Green by Kim McKay & Jenny Bonnin
• He’ll Be OK by Celia Lashlie
• Girl Stuff by Kaz Cooke
• Lucky for Me by Frank Robson
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling
• Obernewtyn Book 1 in The Obernewtyn Chronicles by Isobelle Carmody
• The Gift Book 1 in the Pellinor series by Alison Croggon
• Superior Saturday Book 6 in The Keys to the Kingdom series by Garth Nix
• Twilight: Special Edition by Stephenie Meyer
• George’s Secret Key to the Universe by Lucy & Stephen Hawking
• Treasure Fever! Book 1 in the Schooling Around series Andy Griffiths
• Water Witcher by Jan Ormerod
• The Waterhole by Graeme Base
• Parsley Rabbit’s Book about Books by Frances Watts & David Legge
• Quest for the Crown Book 1 in The Faraway Fairies series by Eleanor Coombe
• Go Girl! Angels: Anniversary Edition by Chrissie Perry & Meredith Badger
• Nim’s Island by Wendy Orr

Vodafone, Optus and Telstra have announced their pricing plans for the iPhone here in Australia.  Take a look at a summary of their proposed pricing structures:

I don’t think they understand what this phone is designed for and what makes it different from any other phone out there.  The difference between this phone and every other phone on the market is its ability to handle data.  If I purchase an iPhone, I’m not interested in getting ridiculous amounts of talk time, I’m interested in data.  I’m still going to keep on making $30 of voice calls each month, regardless of what phone I’m using.  Having data plans starting at 256Mb is simply crazy (although you can still get home broadband plans that have similar low amounts).  Given my browsing habits at home (and the fact that I can jump onto a wi-fi network) I could quite easily cope with 1Gb of data for the time being, but when I only make $25-$30 worth of phone calls a month, what is the incentive to sign up for an extra $1000 of calls a month that will just be wasted?

How about a pricing structure based upon the data usage rather than the talk time? For example:

Isn’t this tailoring the plan to suit the device, rather than just regurgitating the same pricing structure that their previous business models have been based on?  As much as I would love an iPhone, I won’t be lining up tomorrow morning.  I’m going to hold off a little and (hopefully) after the initial hype has died down the carriers will begin to offer some more reasonable plans.

Update 10th July 2008: I added in the prices for their 3G mobile internet plans for extra comparison on how poor their data plans really are.

Update 12th July 2008: Added Telstra pricing

Today we released an upgrade to Picture Australia. Most of the improvements were behind the scenes improvements involving building the framework for features that will be implemented in a few months.  One feature that was implemented was an “Add to del.icio.us” link.  

A “share this” link is nothing new for any news site, blog or current affairs site, in fact for these sites it’s nearly essential to get your content out there and distributed as quickly as possible.  So why is this feature virtually absent from the collection searches of most libraries and museums?  Isn’t it an ideal mechanism for promoting the core content from their collections and giving it the opportunity for further exposure, particularly given the difficulties many museums and libraries face getting their collections indexed by search engines?

Picture Australia currently provides what are essentially “pre-configured” searches on particular topics called trails.  These are designed to be easy and topical introductions into the collections.  With the addition of the “share this” link, now any user can create a group of related images, add their own descriptions, tag it however they like and promote it.  For example, a teacher may want to create a group of images for a class they are teaching, or a historical train society may wish to collate all the references to photographs of trains in their area. Through the use of the del.icio.us API, this user generated trail doesn’t even need to be promoted on del.icio.us, it can be incorporated into any site, displaying it in it’s own context.

I’ve just applied the recent Leopard 10.5.2 update to my iMac at work and noticed that there seems to be some CSS rendering issues with Safari when the text-shadow property is applied to text.

text-shadow: #000 2px 2px 1px; before the 10.5.2 update:

text-shadow: #000 2px 2px 1px; after the 10.5.2 update:

Changing the code back to text-shadow: #000 1px 1px 1px; produces the the same effect as before the update, but now older versions of Safari render the text without the shadow. Is the old version or the new version applying incorrect pixel values?